Economies of Guilt: On Fernanda Melchor’s “This Is Not Miami”
Fernanda Melchor, transl. Sophie Hughes | This Is Not Miami | New Directions | April 2023 | 198 Pages
There is an established tradition of Latin American novelists who started off as journalists. Before breaking out with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez made a living writing columns, film criticism, and political commentary. Carlos Fuentes did similar work for newspapers in Mexico City. Even Clarice Lispector, the experimental mystic of Brazilian letters, published weekly crônicas for a Saturday periodical in Rio de Janeiro. Long before charting new literary territory in their fiction, these writers embraced style and subjectivity in their journalism. Fernanda Melchor, author of the newly-translated collection This Is Not Miami, has followed a similar trajectory.
Melchor’s third book available in English translation, This Is Not Miami, is full of reporting from earlier in the novelist’s life, before she had published any of the fiction she is known for. She characterizes her version of journalism as “an attempt to tell stories in what I regard as the most honest way possible: by accepting language’s inherent obliqueness and using it to the story’s advantage.” Most of This Is Not Miami takes place in Melchor’s hometown of Veracruz: “a society that professes to be an enclave of tropical sensualism but deep down is profoundly conservative, classist, and misogynist.” But in the essays in this collection, Melchor refuses to editorialize. Her prose is too visceral, and her point-of-view too close to her characters to leave room for obvious conclusions. This Is Not Miami is not the work of a gonzo reporter parachuted in from elsewhere to see how the other half lives: Melchor writes about the community she grew up in; the one that shaped her journalism and her fiction. She is less concerned with an illusory ideal of objectivity than with capturing the personalities of Veracruz.
The first essay in the collection, "Lights in the Sky,” is the most personal of the bunch. A young Melchor and her brother visit the beach, where they are entranced by the appearance of a UFO. Dripping with nostalgia, “Lights in the Sky” reads like a José Emilio Pacheco short story, except in this case, the narrator’s innocence is shattered when she realizes, years later, that “the unidentified flying object I saw had not been carrying aliens, but stashes of Colombian cocaine.” Her marvelous childhood memory crumbles under the violent realities of adulthood. And the “narcoplane” sets the tone for the rest of the collection, where the violence erupts closer to the ground.
The pieces in This Is Not Miami, written between 2002 and 2011, are all, in one way or another, crime stories. The source of the crime is often the reigning narco-syndicate of early 2000s Veracruz—a cartel known as Los Zetas, or the “last letter guys,” as locals call them. In one of the later essays in the collection, Melchor delves into the inner workings of Los Zetas through a likable young man named El Fito. As a new recruit, El Fito must survive a violent initiation process, which includes beatings and a fifteen-day incarceration. Yet the actual work is surprisingly boring: El Fito spends hours on end scraping a brick of cocaine. Once his batch is completed, he can “sit back and relax, or even sleep or play PlayStation.” As long as he makes his quota, El Fito doesn’t mind the work.
Beyond the day-to-day grind, Melchor examines her characters’ motivations for working with the narcos. In “Life’s Not Worth a Thing,” two lawyers try to avoid representing Los Zetas, but end up having to meet with a narco boss because they have become too competent at their jobs. While the boss doesn’t force the lawyers into the cartel’s service, the subtext is clear: they must never prosecute anyone connected to the cartel. The lawyers have no choice but to obey. Similarly, El Fito seeks work with Los Zetas after losing his job at a customs agency. He becomes a low-level narco not out of greed, but out of necessity. El Fito further justifies his decision by recalling how both of his employers have referred to him as “a good asset.” At least with Los Zetas, he is paid a higher wage.
There is a widespread belief throughout the United States that gang violence is always “random” or “completely senseless.” As Melchor shows us, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In “Don’t Mess with My Boys,” she tells the story of Lázaro Llinas Castro, the narco boss who helps introduce crack cocaine to “the so-called first port of Mexico.” Llinas Castro commercializes this cheaper version of the Colombian import, and becomes the region’s wealthiest drug baron. He also diversifies his business by buying “an entire block of buildings from the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers” and converting warehouses into “safe places to hide hostages and store weapons and stolen goods.” Through bribes and kickbacks, Llinas Castro makes sure the government and business community benefit from Los Zetas’ trade. The narco boss wishes to join the respectable European-descended elite, and goes so far as to have his nose surgically narrowed in an attempt to assimilate. Throughout the book, the darker-skinned people tend to work low wage jobs and encounter more violence, while the whites reap the benefits. As a small-time smuggler puts it: “Those Spaniards own everything.” Malchor addresses these complexities of race in the title piece, wherein a group of mixed-race dock workers encounter nine Black Dominican stowaways. Desperate to stay out of the hands of the authorities, the Dominicans beg the dockworkers to hide them. What follows is a surprising act of solidarity, where the dockworkers, despite their racist attitudes, agree to help. It is a rare moment of hope in a bleak collection.
Melchor’s treatment of gender is similarly well-observed. Just as she did in her novels Hurricane Season and Paradais, in This is Not Miami, Melchor maps the psyches of desperate men, uncovering a volatile version of manhood that is ultimately propelled by fear. But Melchor also delves into an infamous case of female murder, in the standout essay “Queen, Slave, Woman.” What starts as an archetypal “femme fatale” narrative—a beauty queen murders and dismembers her children—becomes far more tangled when Melchor dips into the street gossip surrounding the case. One witness identified only as “a pimp” suggests that narcos were behind the infanticides, but the beauty queen couldn’t tell the truth otherwise they would murder her next. It is an unlikely story, according to Melchor’s more reputable sources, yet the pimp’s comment is useful as an illustration of misogyny: In Veracruzan society, women are expected to be on the receiving end of batterings and femicides; they are the object on which the violence is enacted, not the perpetrator. A beauty queen dismembering her children must be either impossible, as the pimp claims, or an aberration, as the media coverage suggests.
But under Melchor’s eye, Veracruzan women are more than mere victims of the drug war. The beauty queen, after being imprisoned, begins a romantic relationship with a narco, implicating herself in further acts of violence. Other women cook for the narcos; some choose to party with them. In “Insomnia,” a woman named Rita loses the ability to sleep following a narco-related shootout in her gated community. Rita refuses to let her son play outside after dark, as if she is trying to break the chain of complicity before the links are locked in place. While they are rarely the direct source of violence, these women still have their own tangled relationships with Los Zetas and their ilk.
In Veracruz, guilt is epidemic. Everyone with a conscience has a cross to bear and must seek repentance. In “The House on El Estero,” the longest story in the book, a man named Jorge, who speaks like he’s inside a confessional, recounts “the most fucked-up thing” that ever happened to him. It starts as most horror stories do, with a group of teens partying in an abandoned house. What follows is a harrowing account of demon possession and exorcism. Even though the narrator is skeptical of the story’s supernatural elements, Jorge’s guilt is never in doubt. He chastises himself for not turning back when an old beggar woman warned him against the abandoned house. “Why me, Jorge thought. Because you knew what was in that house and you didn’t speak up. If anything happens to that girl, you’ll be to blame.” Guilt is the demon Jorge must exorcise, and he does so by telling his story. He isn’t the only character in This Is Not Miami to turn to Catholicism, folk religion, or some fusion of the two. And unlike the other powers in Veracruz, the healers and clairvoyants offer repentance. The Aramaic masses and animal sacrifices and spirit expulsions begin to make sense: they fill a void in a guilt-ridden society. One way or another, the demons must be confronted.
The question of who must confront these demons is a different matter. The perpetrators of violence, narco or otherwise, rarely express any regret; and when they do it’s in a roundabout way, like through the lyrics of this corrido, which Melchor references throughout one of the essays: “No way to make amends / for my rapist, my killer.” In a tragic reversal, the characters most removed from the violence end up bearing the weight of the guilt. In the final essay, a little girl recalls a sleepless night when “you couldn’t shake the feeling that you were as guilty as the armed soldiers.” Another child in the piece thinks, “That’s why you’re crying, because it’s all your fault.” Never mind that the child is nursing a bullet wound or that the hospital refuses to sew up the child’s innards because of a lack of health insurance: the child is the guilty one. Contrast the attitudes of these powerless children with the unrepentance of the narco bosses and their enablers in government and industry. This is the consequence of violence in Veracruz: a trickle-down economy of guilt, where the most powerless are the ones who must repent.
If these cycles of violence and guilt feel familiar, it is because the United States carries similar pathologies. Yet how should we read This Is Not Miami? How can an American reader imagine these scenes without veering into violent voyeurism? Melchor herself is wary of being misunderstood in translation. In a 2022 interview with the New York Times, she said, “Am I afraid that people will think that Trump is right reading my novels? Sometimes.” Still, it would take a gross misreading of her latest book to see it as an endorsement of deportations and xenophobia. As for why the United States continues to wage the drug war, the answer is obvious: we benefit from this exportation of violence. Gun manufacturers profit from arms smuggling; American drug users snort cocaine trafficked by groups like Los Zetas; lawmakers scapegoat Mexico, distracting from the plague of gun violence sweeping through American cities and towns. There is plenty of complicity on our side of the border, and precious little guilt. Melchor doesn’t state this explicitly, nor should she have to. Her argument is more distressing: to paint a portrait of her native Veracruz, a place where the “rich pricks at the center of it all” rake in the profits, while everyone else pays for it in guilt and blood.